Baseball is still the American pastime. Each season, myriad boys of summer offer up fresh stories of struggle and success to build the sports legends of tomorrow. This time, for instance, especially in Southern California, all eyes are on Shohei Ohtani, the Angels’ Japanese recruit with the confounding ability to pitch and hit like a pro.

But this year, the player most emblematic of America today isn’t on the field. Rather, in a twist of poetic irony, it’s Ohtani’s great predecessor, Babe Ruth, whose legacy-saving goodwill tour in a Japan on the verge of world war starkly captures the uncertain place of the United States at this moment in history and our own popular imagination.

The Babe’s ghost haunts America today with a story to tell — one rich with uncanny metaphor. By the early 1930s, Ruth was all but washed up: he knew it, the league’s coaches and managers knew it, and, unless something dramatic changed, the fans and the history books would know it too. Crowning Ruth’s depression and dissolution, he was still performing by standards the envy of ordinary players.

But a .288 batting average, with 22 home runs on the year, was abysmal for the Babe. Merely good play was fatal, not just to his mystique but to his reputation. Victim of his own success — and the irresponsible, directionless personal behavior that had sapped him of his strength and focus — Ruth needed a miracle.

That miracle had a name: Sotaro Suzuki, Tokyo newspaperman. Major League Baseball, Suzuki had learned, just approved an all-star barnstorming tour of Japan for the winter of 1934. A successful round of exhibition games would secure the Japanese a pro league of their own. A disappointment would shelve that dream indefinitely. So Suzuki, in a trip to the U.S. just years before Pearl Harbor, convinces tour manager Connie Mack to make Ruth great again — plucking him out of his American malaise and plunging him into the midst of an undimmed fandom in Japan. Ruth, seeing the writing on the wall, agreed.

It wasn’t easy. Fighting relationship trouble off the field and personal acrimony in the clubhouse, pushing body and mind to pull off winning performances, Babe not only delivered for Japan and the League. He pulled himself out of his self-destructive tailspin by restoring his confidence through a newfound humility. Rather than obsessing over protecting his pride by securing a coveted managerial position, he returned to the U.S. prepared to go out on a grace note with one more season under the Boston Braves. Though eventually squeezed out of any post-player career in his sport, Ruth retired redeemed.

Today, Ruth’s volatile mix of great power and corrosive funk is more than apparent in American culture and politics — both at home and abroad. Like Ruth, the U.S. finds itself deep into a matured leading role weakened by reckless living and costly mistakes. And like Ruth, Americans feel trapped by what was. Other countries might be able to settle into a comfortable mediocrity, but for us, to downgrade from shining-city status is to plunge into darkness. While we still have resources and resilience on our side, and a fighting spirit to match, we crave an opportunity to prove once again that we measure up to our high standards and better angels.

But analogies between individuals and nations can only go so far. If, like Ruth, the U.S. can recover its passion and purpose by stretching outside its comfort zone and renewing a spirit of human goodwill, unlike the Babe, our country can’t look forward to that process of inner and outer redemption clearing the karmic decks for a natural demise and rest in peace. We can’t even anticipate a “Braves option” for domestic or international politics, or for the still-deepening culture war.

Fortunately, it’s true that Ruth’s final act can serve as a template or inspiration for individual Americans at any crossroads in their lives. Brick by personal brick, community by community, the experience of retrieving humbler, stronger selves can scale up in a powerful way; even more importantly, it can do so in a way that our prevailing models of institution-building and policymaking really can’t properly predict or process.

It’s in times of crisis in the ancient sense — of the pivotal moment in the health of the suffering — that the floodgates of spiritual resources are often mysteriously unlocked and thrown open. Laws, regulations, and agitation, no matter how well-intended, can’t do that alone. As Ruth surprised, and surprised himself, so too can we.

Still, the reckoning we face as a nation demands a retrieval and renewal of politics as it was once understood. The whole point of regimes is to last for generations, outlasting individuals and the “present time.” But the way to do that runs through the difficult work of reconciling the past and the future in the choices of the living, no matter how daunting or uncanny the situation appears.

Today’s digitally-dominated but up-for-grabs world would be far more alien to the Babe than prewar Japan. We can’t let that unnerve us, even if it means letting go of our sometimes jealously-guarded nostalgia for a storybook America that will never return — and, in some crucial respects, never was.

James Poulos is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group.